Right to die

A morbid thought today, while reading about the horrors of the US prison system: if we are going to sentence people to a lifetime of incarceration, shouldn't we at least offer them the choice to die instead? It seems to me that, as deeply uncomfortable as it is, suicide can be a rational action when faced with a sufficiently bad alternative. Suicidal desires being a marker of mental illness isn't so much an indictment of suicide as it is a signal that someone has severely overestimated the badness of their other options.

Reading about the valiant efforts of prison staff to revive and repair the bodies of suicidal inmates so they can continue to live in conditions they would rather die than endure is a particular kind of horror. I remember reading Fahrenheit 451 and being most disturbed not by the book burning, but by a particular scene where the stereotypical housewife's life becomes so meaningless that she decides to kill herself. But the medical technology in the story is so good that paramedics just come by, patch her up, and she wakes up the next morning as if nothing has happened. It's implied that they've done this a number of times.

The right to die is the final relief valve of life. You can at least know that no matter how bad things get, they can't get worse than death. Taking that away is perhaps the most profound violation I can imagine.